SHALLOWS by C.C. O'Hanlon

Thoreau had his pond. This is mine.

It is not a pond, really, but a pool, an ovoid sump of water in a tangle of brackish tidal furrows that dry to black mud at low water. It is, at most, half a fathom deep and a couple of cables in circumference, just enough for a small boat to lie at anchor, undisturbed, afloat.

Around it, in every direction, salt marsh, brittle reeds and desiccated grasses, all shivering in a cold, autumn easterly carrying a saline haze and intermittent showers from the sea.

Carried my boat and me here, too, this morning.

I was a mile offshore when the wind rose. The sea concertina'd into a short, steep swell that clawed at the gunwhales and crawled over the un-decked bow to lift the burden boards beneath my feet. I was forced to heave-to, reef, then run towards an unmarked gat and the shelter of low, mutable banks that resisted easy definition as 'shore'.

I sailed and sculled further inland on the last of a flooding tide. Neap high water, a few inches deeper than my boat's draft, allowed me to thread shallower reaches — green tendrils of drying creeks and swashways on my out-of-date Admiralty chart, unreliable data for a passage through this expanse of shoal water, sand, mud, and yellow marshland.

I was not unprepared.

My boat is small, just 14 feet from stem-post to stern, but sturdy — clinker hull, hand-sawn, copper-fastened mahogany planks on oak frames — even if it has seen better days. A loose-footed, red canvas lugsail hangs from varnished, timber spars.

Stowed aboard:

An old boat compass, in a weathered, grey teak box, wedged between frames behind the centreboard case.

A sounding lead, eye-spliced to a coiled length of frayed, three-stranded cordage, each fathom marked by strips of red or plain canvas sailcloth or leather.

Two metal thermoses, both filled, one with tea, one with soup.

An oiled canvas rucksack — in it, a change of clothes, sneakers, a folded Ordnance Survey map, a marine hand-bearing compass, a stainless steel folding knife with shackle key and marlin spike, a large note book, two HB2 pencils, a bar of chocolate, an apple, and a plastic box of peanut butter sandwiches.

A pair of long timber oars, dressed with hand stitched leather sleeves and collars.

Ten fathoms of lightweight braided rode bent to a small anchor that I have just laid from the bow to hold the boat's head to the tide.

***

To the east, a church spire — marked by a cross on a spill of yellow defining dry land on my chart. North of it, a sliver of red metal rooftop over white timber, and close by, the whitewashed pylons of a timber public jetty. There is an outline of buildings on the chart that might be a village but I can't see them. I'll make towards there a few hours before the next high water.

I am in this pool, this pocket of sequestered sea and I want, somehow, to fix it, to give it substance. I take a bearing on the spire and draw its line across the Admiralty chart, circling the point at which it intersects my anchorage, a speck of blue — half a fathom noted at mean low water springs — amid the green of drying flats and banks. There are no other useful points of reference. Without a cross- bearing, 'X' cannot mark the spot.

Henry David Thoreau was a self-taught surveyor, probably because, like writing, it was a way of imposing order, some sense of godliness, on raw, unruly nature. One of his earliest projects was a plan of Walden Pond, dated 1864. Thoreau lacked talent as a draughtsman but he made up for it with diligent attention to calculable data. He took to the water to plot lines of soundings — noting the greatest depth, 102 feet — and hiked the pond's 1.7 mile shoreline, carrying a theodolite on a timber tripod, to measure its circumference and area.

I remember my first experience of hanami, decades ago, strolling through Tokyo's Ueno Park to view the rows of blossoming cherry trees. I remember the Japanese woman who had taken me there telling me, "It is beautiful, yes. But I am not a nature person."

I am not a nature person either. I cannot name any of the grasses around me here, nor any of the birds, other than gulls and shearwaters. I am incurious about them. But my vocabulary for wind and water is as rich and nuanced as an Inuit's for snow and ice — I study the interplay and antic shape- shifting of these elements every chance I get.

And I take care not to talk about what I observe in anthromorphic terms: The sea has no mood, an old sailor once told me.

The sea isn't cruel. It isn't anything at all. It is just the sea.

I am afloat on what is left of it here, sitting amidships on the bottom of the boat, back against the thwart, squinting up at thin stratus, a nacreous scrim across a pale sun. The wind backs north-east. The boat swings around on its rode. Jittery water laps the timber planks beside me.

***

In the old days, the bottom of a plummet — as a sounding lead was sometimes called — was packed with greasy tallow before being swung from amidships. When the plummet touched bottom, mud, sand or gravel adhered to the tallow, giving the navigator an idea of the ground. If it was rock, the tallow came up clean.

Everywhere here is mud, dark, oleaginous sludge that resists light and turns shallow water a murky charcoal grey.

The tide turns as the sun's passage to the western edge of the marshes, obscured by cloud and haze, appears to accelerate. There is a faint burble — the first thin runnels of flood spilling across the swashway and through the gats to fill the narrow creeks.

A couple of hours pass. The boat lifts a little as my pool begins to swell. I stand up, balance myself against the thwart and hoist the awkward lugsail and its angled yard. Then I weigh anchor, jerking the rode a few times just before the flukes reaches the surface to shake off fistfuls of mud. A chalky residue swirls along the hull as we begin to make way.

I steer from the pool into a narrow creek leading west. What will I do if it is a dead end? The waterways within this sea of mud and grasses are a maze. Long stretches are unnavigable, even at high water — little more than waterlogged ditches and furrows.

Wind and tide make retreat impossible. Inland is the only course.

I squint into the sun under the foot of the sail, trying divine the depth and flow of the water ahead, gauging my heading on the distant church spire, almost unseeable in the glare. I will the angle between it and the boat's stemhead to close, to reassure me that I'm gaining some northing as we hurry further inland on the flood.

North and south, the marshland has turned a rich ochre. I will be ashore by dusk.

***

The boat has run too far ahead of the flood.

A quarter of a mile from the jetty, just before this skinny reach carries us into a patch of deeper water — another, bigger pool — the keel bumps into a muddy shoal, which holds it. I draw a deep breath and wait for the flood to lift us off.

It doesn't.

I stand up and shuffle amidships. With two hands, I angle an oar over the gunwhale to probe the bottom. I try to pole the hull sideways into what might be deeper water, adjusting my weight to heel the boat and reduce its draft.

She is stuck fast.

I study my out-of-date chart for reassurance but the drying height for this channel is unmarked. Without a tide table to give me a range for today, I can only hope another hour of rise will be enough to float us.

I toy with the idea of stripping off and going over the side to lighten the hull and push it into deeper water. But I have learned through gelid experience to avoid getting wet aboard an open, unsheltered boat. Nothing to do, then, but trust to time and tide. I prop my rucksack against the sternsheets, and lie my head on it, stretching my legs forward along the burden boards.

I close my eyes and listen — to the wind, what little there is of it now, to the water scurrying along the hull strakes, to the faint suck and scrape of mud around the keel. Patience is a necessary virtue for a sailor.

The first lesson of sea navigation is that you never sail to anywhere, you sail towards it, a semantic caveat that takes account of the uncertainty of every sea passage, even across sheltered waters, and defines a sailor's readiness to adapt to whatever befalls their vessels — unexpected calms or squalls, contrary tidal streams, a seabed's topographical drift.

In the ill-defined, liminal water/land of these marshes, even less can be relied upon. I wait.